{"id":1555,"date":"2021-12-12T18:00:30","date_gmt":"2021-12-12T18:00:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/?p=1555"},"modified":"2021-12-12T18:00:30","modified_gmt":"2021-12-12T18:00:30","slug":"kyu-lee-interview-why-com2us-holdings-pivoted-into-blockchain-games","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/egrowonline.com\/?p=1555","title":{"rendered":"Kyu Lee interview — Why Com2Us Holdings pivoted into blockchain games"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Join gaming leaders, alongside GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming, for their 2nd Annual GamesBeat & Facebook Gaming Summit | GamesBeat: Into the Metaverse 2 this upcoming January 25-27, 2022. Learn more about the event.<\/a>\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

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Kyu Lee, president of Com2Us USA<\/a>, has been making mobile games like Summoners War for many years. But a few years ago, the whole company started exploring making games using blockchain and nonfungible tokens (NFTs).<\/p>\n

In 2020, the Seoul-based company invested in Coinone, a big cryptocurrency exchange in South Korea, and it invested in Wysiwyg Studio. It looked for partners and invested in Animoca Brands, Sandbox, Upland, and Mythical Games. It also rebranded itself globally from Gamevil to Com2Us Holdings.<\/p>\n

And now the company is pivoting in a major way, going beyond free-to-play mobile games that have brought it great prosperity and partnerships with brands like the NBA. Its entire staff is diving into NFT games and other blockchain technology, and it will focus on them in the same way that it focused on the transition to free-to-play mobiel games many years ago.<\/p>\n

This makes Com2Us one of the biggest mobile game companies to move into NFT games. Established in 1998 and headquartered in South Korea, Com2uS became a subsidiary of mobile game publisher Gamevil in 2013 (and now the whole company is Com2Us Holdings). Com2Us\u2019 Summoners War has more than 100 million downloads and $2 billion in sales.<\/p>\n

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The 2nd Annual GamesBeat and Facebook Gaming Summit and GamesBeat: Into the Metaverse 2<\/p>\n<\/div>\n


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Com2Us games coming soon include Chromatic Soul: AFK, Kritika: the White Knights, Project MR , and Summoners War: Chronicles. Blockchain games coming soon include Baseball Superstars, World of Zenonia, and The Great Merchant.<\/p>\n

I caughter up with Lee about this pivot and quizzed him about it.\u00a0Here\u2019s an edited transcript of our interview.<\/p>\n

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\"Kyu\"Kyu<\/p>\n

Above: Kyu Lee is president of Com2Us.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Com2Us<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

GamesBeat: It sounds like a big pivot for Gamevil and Com2Us. Can you talk about the context and the background?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Kyu Lee:<\/strong> In 2020 we started investing in Coinone. Coinone is the third largest crypto exchange in South Korea. We were always generally interested in the blockchain space, but we didn\u2019t have any action items, so to speak. We knew that there was a lot of traction there. We knew we needed to study it a bit more. We decided to invest in an exchange. That would be the best way to start learning.<\/p>\n

After that, NBA Top Shot came around. Because we\u2019re also very involved in the sports collectible market in some ways \u2013 we have four games with Major League Baseball, and we also have a game with the NBA \u2013 we were trying to figure out NFTs. We were thinking this was going to be mass market. It\u2019s a big signal that a top brand like the NBA was getting on top of that.<\/p>\n

When we saw the numbers coming up from Axie Infinity, we played the game. We saw that there\u2019s so much opportunity. There are so many hurdles in the game that it was unbelievable, but it was also unbelievable that it was generating that much profit, and so many people were playing. That\u2019s what got us into it. We started talking to our internal production teams to make this thing real. We started preparing, researching the games. Our CEO, Yong Kuk Lee, has a lot of interest in this space. He\u2019s always been thinking about the metaverse and all of that.<\/p>\n

What happened in the meantime, we acquired a company called Wysiwyg Studios. Wysiwyg Studios is a publicly listed South Korean company. They\u2019re originally a VFX studio. They\u2019ve done a lot of things in the metaverse preparation area, so to speak. But when we acquired them, we did it because we thought Netflix was the new app store for all of the TV production companies in South Korea. There\u2019s so much great talent in South Korea, but they were only distributing their content through the local TV service providers. With Netflix, there\u2019s more room for\u2013there\u2019s a big company called Studio Dragon that does a lot of distribution through Netflix. We thought there was much more play to be done, so we thought we should acquire Wysiwyg and roll up a lot of TV production studios underneath it.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s a lot of synergies between the entertainment business, the webtoons, the IP creation that they\u2019re doing. They always wanted to partner with a gaming company and we always wanted to expand our IP. We\u2019ve done that through our partnership with Skybound, but how can we do more of this? That was the vision we had. All of these things pointed in a direction where we had to go Web3. We had to do metaverse. We had to do blockchain gaming. We had to do NFTs. That\u2019s how we ended up investing in Candy.com. Candy.com has the exclusive rights for Major League Baseball NFTs. We went in with Insight and Softbank. We put in $10 million of investment there.<\/p>\n

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Above: Com2Us Holdings is moving into blockchain games.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Com2Us<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

While our company was moving its production teams over, looking for the right blockchain and the right partners, we thought that money could move faster. We started talking to all of the top players in the blockchain gaming and metaverse space. That\u2019s how we ended up investing in Animoca Brands, Sandbox, Upland, and Mythical Games. Those were the four investments that we also did. These were all pretty late-stage, already established companies, but it was a great way to get our foot in and understand what\u2019s going on, build relationships within the ecosystem, and also promote that we are not only just a gaming company, but we have ambitions to become a blockchain gaming company too.<\/p>\n

I think it worked out pretty well. After we started doing those investments\u2013all of these were oversubscribed rounds, but I think everyone was happy to have a gaming company. We\u2019re not the biggest gaming company in the world, but we\u2019re an established gaming company coming on their cap table. They were very welcoming of our entry into the space. They all made room for us to invest. We\u2019re very happy about that. Now we\u2019re looking at a lot more companies to invest in, even at earlier stages. We want to become like what Animoca is doing. That looks really cool.<\/p>\n

Our approach inside\u2013we thought about a lot of different chains. There are so many great chains and solutions that we could have adopted. Personally, I love what Solana is doing and how they\u2019re building up an ecosystem that\u2019s going to be awesome to run games, because of the speed and all that. But we decided to work with Terra. Terra being a South Korean company and such an established company in the crypto space\u2013they have an amazing ecosystem. I was pretty shocked that they weren\u2019t as well-known in the west. It seems like even within the past few months, though, they\u2019ve been gaining so much traction.<\/p>\n

When you\u2019re only doing a stablecoin play or a DeFi play, it doesn\u2019t gain a lot of traction among the app developers or the entertainment space, where we are. After they announced their smart contracts I\u2019m seeing so many projects being built on Terra. Just reading through the hundreds of pages of documents in English is a tough one to swallow for our development team. Having a South Korean team\u2013Do Kwan, the CEO, is amazing. Having his team to help us was a perfect fit. We\u2019re very happy with the relationship that we have with Terra. We\u2019re building an NFT marketplace that\u2019s going to have K-pop stars and all the entertainment brands we have. It\u2019s going to be about gaming too. We\u2019re also going to use them as our blockchain partner. We\u2019re going to build wallets together and everything else we need to service our games.<\/p>\n

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Above: Com2Us is working on multiple blockchain games.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Com2Us<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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GamesBeat: It seems like about as full a pivot as you could do. Are you planning to still do non-NFT, non-blockchain mobile games?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> There are still a lot of restrictions on where we can service our games and where we can\u2019t. The very interesting thing that I learned, though, is that once you step into this side of the world, the other side looks so stale and boring. I\u2019ve been telling my friends\u2013all of these people, when they step into this new world, everybody talks about the same thing. This feels like how it felt when mobile was starting. Just having that feel of enjoyment and learning everything that you can. Making sure that you\u2019re on the beat all the time. That in itself is so rewarding.<\/p>\n

We still have a lot of products that are going to launch as scheduled. But I think a lot of our production heads are becoming much more open-minded about moving over. They\u2019ve been launching game after game. They probably needed something new like this.<\/p>\n

GamesBeat: The developers themselves are interested in going this direction, then?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> Yes, yes. This empowers you in a lot of ways. I only noticed how\u2013when the App Store first came around, I thought, \u201cOh, let\u2019s have a virtual currency that can run across all of our games. Let\u2019s make a market where the users can buy and sell.\u201d We had these ideas. But by following the rules, we contained ourselves into a fixed way of thinking. With all of these blockchain technologies enabling game developers, you realize, \u201cOh, I forgot that we could do that!\u201d We run into so many of those moments. It\u2019s another great tool for game developers to express themselves. If you want to use that tool, we want to encourage that.<\/p>\n

Obviously there are going to be a lot of games that work better in the Web2 world. But there are going to be tons of new types of games that we\u2019ll see in the Web3 world.<\/p>\n

GamesBeat: Is there a certain percentage of the company that\u2019s dedicated to working on this, or is basically everyone working on it?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> At this stage, it\u2019s everyone. The order is coming from the top in our company. Everyone is going to go through the educational curve. We started out having a small team, but now that there are so many different projects involved\u2013it\u2019s not anything secret, and it\u2019s not just one or two projects. We\u2019ve already announced around 10 projects for the new year. We pivoted a lot of the games we were planning to launch this year or early next year, and we\u2019re repositioning them so that they have a play-to-earn or NFT aspect.<\/p>\n

If you remember when in-app purchases first came out on the App Store, I don\u2019t think every game all of a sudden went over to free-to-play, following the true spirit of free-to-play. There were some limited adoption efforts. I think we\u2019ll go through that same process. Not everything may be fully baked in. We\u2019ll learn a lot. We\u2019ll fail a lot, but at least from a gaming perspective, I think we\u2019re bringing in the best-looking games. All of the games I\u2019ve looked at so far, they\u2019re good, but they\u2019re super high production quality. A lot of the games we\u2019re releasing even in the next year have been in development for four or five years.<\/p>\n

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\"Com2Us\"Com2Us<\/p>\n

Above: Com2Us started in 1998 and merged with Gamevil in 2013.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Com2Us<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

GamesBeat: Did you see the Ubisoft announcement about NFTs<\/a> in Ghost Recon Breakpoint?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> I saw the link.<\/p>\n

GamesBeat: It\u2019s the tiniest of steps. I think it\u2019s meant to educate the market and get people to accept it. It\u2019s a very strictly controlled distribution to people who played a lot of the Ghost Recon game. And even those who buy in on the secondary market have to have played the game as well. They\u2019re not selling the NFTs. They\u2019re being as careful as you can going into this. [Ubisoft pulled down a video due to lots of negative feedback].<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> There\u2019s going to be a lot of baby steps. But those games are going to look much better. A lot of the newer projects that are starting from the ground up in our studios, they\u2019ll probably try to think about how they can adopt the technology as much as possible. But those games will take another two, three, four, however many years. Who knows? There will be so many new trends.<\/p>\n

Right now we saw Axie Infinity. Everybody\u2019s thinking in that mentality. In South Korea there was a game called Mir4, made by Wemade. That game was completely the opposite. They switched a free-to-play game and just added a small amount of play-to-earn aspects. Now all of a sudden people are realizing you can do this. There\u2019s going to be a lot of swings, even within our production teams, around how they\u2019re going to design these new kinds of economies. That\u2019s how I see it.<\/p>\n

GamesBeat: Have you seen any resistance from gamers? I know Ubisoft has run into some of that today. It seems like the more hardcore gamers, they associate this with things like loot boxes and scams and aggressive monetization.<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> We haven\u2019t seen that much from our users yet. I\u2019ve seen it around other games. Even Cookie Run, at one of our sister game companies, they announced they were going to do Cookie Run NFTs and they faced a huge backlash. We\u2019ll have to see. The same thing happened as everyone was moving over to free-to-play and using things like loot boxes. It\u2019s going to require a lot of education. We\u2019re filling in a gap, I think, and we\u2019re going to provide much more value to our users at the same time.<\/p>\n

Even crypto itself still has a lot of negative associations around it, whether it\u2019s environmental impact or money laundering and all of that. But it\u2019s such a powerful tool. We just have to try to use it the right way.<\/p>\n

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\"Com2Us\"\"Com2Us\"<\/p>\n

Above: Kritika: the White Knights is coming in Q1 2022.<\/p>\n

Image Credit: Com2Us<\/em><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

GamesBeat: How soon are some of these things going to arrive? Are you looking at 2022?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to come first. Our schedules always change. Most of the games are going to come around the middle of next year, though.<\/p>\n

GamesBeat: Anything else you\u2019d like to mention today?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Lee:<\/strong> A lot of the time we feel like we\u2019re moving in fast forward. We want to be in a leading position. That may mean we take the bullets. But we want to pave the way. We\u2019re very excited about this new opportunity. It\u2019s going to be fun.<\/p>\n

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